Digital graphic design, image editing, audio editing, and video editing applications (hereafter collectively referred to as media content editing applications or media-editing applications) provide graphical designers, media artists, and other users with the necessary tools to create a variety of media content. Examples of such applications include Final Cut Pro® and iMovie®, both sold by Apple, Inc. These applications give users the ability to edit, combine, transition, overlay, and piece together different media content in a variety of manners to create a resulting media project. The resulting media project specifies a particular sequenced composition of any number of text, audio, image, and/or video content elements that is used to create a media presentation.
Various media-editing applications facilitate such composition through electronic means. Specifically, a computer or other electronic device with a processor and computer readable storage medium executes the media-editing application. In so doing, the computer generates a graphical interface that allows designers to digitally manipulate graphical representations of the media content to produce a desired result. However, in many cases, the designers experience inconvenience in manipulating graphical representations of the media content because of the shortcomings of the existing applications. For example, when a user quickly skims through a video clip by moving a skimming tool across a representation of the video clip, the user may experience delay in viewing the pictures from the video clip as some pictures in the video clip take longer time to decode and display than others.